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Tuesday, November 01, 2016

The History Of Car Audio

Hello Dumpster Divers,

This took over a month to write and was almost lost forever this afternoon due to a nuclear Blogger blog-editing error in cross-contaminating the hard coding of the final notes for this post I had sketched down in LibreOffice while copying them to edit into the native Blogger blog editor.

Imagine taking a project of this size (one of the longest and most comprehensive posts I've written in a while), with no safety back up and with one foolish copy and paste into the blog and a one horrifyingly consequential back-keystroke (without reading the raw HTML), suddenly alter six weeks of work and research into an unreadable mess.

At least this time, it was merely altered. But it could be straightened out (if I recovered from my heart attack.) So I copied the entire post back into LibreOffice and line by line, replaced the paragraphs, photos and YouTube videos back in their proper order, editing and sweating bullets along the way.

And talking to the passenger(s) in your car. And they weren't
always pleasant to listen to.

Or singing/whistling/humming. Which made you unlistenable to the passengers in your car.

But by the 1920s, radio had just invaded the American home and
people just couldn't get enough of it. Suddenly, the house wasn't so boring. But there were some major problems;
The first radios were noisy, difficult to tune, needed tinny headsets or ugly sqwaky horns to listen to, required enormous outdoor antennas that few people then understood the science of and battery
units with liquid acids that could leak and spill. And some people
thought it was a dangerous distraction to have a radio in the car.
And at that time, it really was.

But that didn't stop people from trying. There were attempts to
bring radio to automobiles as early as 1904 when radio pioneer Lee
DeForest demonstrated radio as a means of vehicle to vehicle
communications at the 1904 World Exhibition in St. Louis.

16 year old Bud Slocum
was the coolest teenager in Ionia, Michigan (and on the planet)
in 1922. And from his pose, you can tell he knew it. He not only had
his own ride (when car ownership was extremely rare among teenagers
back then), but one of the very first car radios.

The October 28, 1922
issue of Radio World featured an early car radio prototype called
"The Dashboard Special"

And the very first factory installed car radios also appeared when
Chevrolet offered a Westinghouse radio for it's 1922 model year as a
$200 option ($2,734 in 2016 dollars and almost half the price as the
car itself!)

But for the most part, car radios were still a rarity. A toy for
the wealthy or those geeky enough to do it themselves. A lot of
people still didn't even have home radios.

But before the invention of superheterodyne tuning,
radios in cars really weren't practical because the tuning of these
radios needed constant adjustment. So you also had to be very patient
and careful. The tuned radio frequency (TRF) receivers of that time
had three knobs just for tuning alone. And each had to be adjusted
individually for each radio frequency, which were of course, all AM.

A TRF radio from 1924.
You had to not only tune all three knobs to get on a specific
frequency, you also had to write down the number of each dial if you
wanted to tune back in to a specific station later. Image: Radio
Boulevard

Vibrations from the vehicle would also cause the
tuning to drift into an unlistenable mess after all your patience in
getting it tuned right. And secondly, there were no speakers. All
listening was done with headsets on these early car radios. Radios
were also prone to ghastly static interference from ignitions and
spark plugs.

Superheterodyne tuning was becoming standard on home
receivers by the late 1920s. It reduced the tuning to a single knob
and improved the sound, reception and stability of radios and once
again, the idea of a radio just for cars was revisited. This time, it
stuck.

In 1926, Philco invented what could be considered the
very first mass produced car radio, the Transitone and production
began for the 1927 model year to be an option in Chevrolet sedans.

Philco may have been first, but it was a man named
Paul Galvin that made the car radio a necessity. Galvin and his brother, Joseph, bought the bankrupt
Stewart Battery Company at auction for $750.

The Stewart Battery Company also offered The Battery
Eliminator, which allowed battery operated home radios to run on
household current, the forerunner to today's wall-wart AC adapters.
Which was also probably the likely cause of the Stewart Battery
Company's bankruptcy as well.

The Galvin brothers were savvier than that. They
bought the Stewart Battery Company specifically for their
battery eliminator designs and manufacturing equipment for them. They
renamed as Galvin Manufacturing Corporation, ceased battery
production and concentrated only on battery eliminators for radios.
They had $565 in capital and five employees. The first week's payroll
was $63.

But battery eliminators themselves were becoming
obsolete as AC powered radios were becoming standard and the Galvin
brothers needed something fast. Paul Galvin had met two radio
engineers, William Lear and Elmer Wavering who created their own car
radio and demonstrated it at a radio convention in Chicago.

What made
Lear and Wavering's design different was they also eliminated the
static interference problem. They identified each cause of
interference and created shielding to isolate it. With curiosity
peaked, Paul Galvin set forth to create an easy to install,
inexpensive car radio for the masses. His team built a working unit
in Paul Galvin's Studebaker.

Galvin was so sure he hit solid gold that when he
applied for a business loan, he tried to clinch the deal by having
Lear and Wavering install a radio in the banker's car. The banker's
car caught fire a half hour later.

They didn't get the loan.

Unfazed, Galvin drove 800 miles to the Radio
Manufacturer's Association meeting in Atlantic City, New Jersey in
June of 1930. Too broke to afford a booth, Paul Galvin just parked
outside the convention, turned up the volume for passersby to hear
and let his product speak for itself.

A reproduction of the
1930 Motorola ST71. The world's first after-market car radio. The
main chassis was bolted to the floor, the tuning and volume were made
to fit on the side of the steering column and the speaker was either
hung from the roof or placed haphazardly.on the floor. Sounds like my
old car. Image: MIT
Technology Review

And there were orders. Lots of them. And Galvin
Manufacturing Corporation was saved. But this radio needed a name.
And a "Galvin" just didn't seem very catchy. But Paul
Galvin came up with "Motorola", a play on "motor"
and "Victrola". There were lots of product names ending in
-ola. Movieola, Crayola. It just sounded good.

Galvin officially
renamed the company Motorola Inc in 1947. And an empire was born.
Motorola sold it's first car radio on June 23, 1930 to H.C.Wall of
Fort Wayne, Indiana for $130.

Motorola also made inroads into two-way police radios. Invented in Australia by Senior Constable Frederick William Downie of the Victoria Police Department in 1923, cops around the world
were finding two-way police radio to be lifesavers and a necessity. Radio equipment became
mandatory in every first responder department. At that time, the American police radio
band was 1550-1750 kHz in larger cities and 2100-2490 kHz in smaller
towns and rural areas.

But while the American AM radio band before the North American Radio Broadcasting Agreement (NARBA) legally ran from 550-1500 kHz, the lower police band was still tunable on most
ordinary radios and some early radio dials ran as high as 1800 kHz. That created a problem with criminals getting advance
warning by eavesdropping on police reports on higher tuning (or modified as such) radios. Not to mention nighttime skywave interference from other police department radio systems. So by 1932, all police radio communication started to be moved up to higher (and higher), shorter-range bands, FM transmission and eventually, digital encryption. The lower frequencies were also used for early TV experiments.

And the lower frequency police band of 1500-1600 kHz was also
established in 1932 as an experimental High Fidelity radio band.
The most famous station in this band was W2XR 1550 AM New York, which
became WQXR, a legendary New York City classical music station. NARBA officially incorporated 1500-1600 kHz into the standard AM radio band. A later expansion in the 1980s added 1600-1700 kHz in the AM radio band

But radios didn't become standard equipment in cars until after
World War II. In fact, very few auto manufacturers offered radios and
only in selected models. Car radios were still considered a novelty
to them in spite of the growing number of after-market manufacturers,
including Philco and Delco,

Nearly all car radios were AM only. AM was the dominant radio band
and would be until 1975. FM radio in the 1950s at this time was rare
in the home and even rarer in cars. And second, FM radio signals at
the time were quiet and uncompressed. While AM signals remained
fairly steady driving over hills and around buildings, FM in motion
was subject to the "picket fencing" effect, the
"fwip-fwip-fwip" sound an FM radio makes in motion.)
Because of this, FM was thought as useless for cars by most
mainstream radio manufacturers. But this didn't prevent upstart
innovators from trying.

The Gonset 3311 FM
Automobile Radio Tuner was the first FM car radio converter. These
converters mounted under the dash and used a tiny built-in AM
transmitter tunable on a couple of pre-set frequencies to rebroadcast the FM signal to the car's AM radio.
FM radio converters like this were available until the early 1980s.
Image: Somerset

High Fidelity became a national craze in the 1950s. And
experimentation spilled over to automobiles. But until 1956, it was
only radios. You still couldn't play your own recorded music in your
car.

Enter the Chrysler Highway Hi-Fi.

The Highway Hi-Fi was an option for newer Chrysler cars from 1956
to 1960. They played special 7" records that played at 16 2/3
RPM, half the speed of a standard LP. The 16
RPM speed also became featured on many home record changers,
allowing these records to be played in the car or at home.

The benefit of a slower speed was it allowed for longer play on
small convenient records. And the stylus and tone arm of the player
was less susceptible to skipping around the grooves from vibrations
of the car. The tone arms of the players were also very heavy, which
lead to a record wear problem.

There were also only 42 titles, all of them back catalog material
of Columbia Records. The discs were made by the Special Products
division of Columbia for Chrysler. There were no other record
companies that made records that were compatible with the Highway
Hi-Fi.

Chrysler dropped the 16 RPM Highway Hi-Fi in 1960 and quickly
reinvented the Highway Hi-Fi in the early 1960s as an after-market
system using RCA's 45
RPM records in a changer. While this allowed for broader
selection as nearly all record companies made 45 RPM records, the
record wear problem and skipping in the grooves from vehicle
vibrations remained. And ultimately, RCA gave up on the system.

But auto manufacturers didn't give up on the concept of car audio.
In fact, their attention merely shifted to endless-loop cartridge
tape systems such as the 4 Track tape player.

The endless loop tape cartridge was invented in 1952. It had many
potential uses, but radio stations adopted the endless loop cartridge before
anyone.

The benefit of "carts", as they were known was it
prevented record wear (a major problem in the early days of Top 40
radio) With a song, jingle or commercial on each cartridge, they
could be erased and reused as songs that either stalled or fell off
the charts were replaced by breaking new hits. Or as jingles and
commercials were updated. It made on-air radio production much
simpler when using highly repeated material.

Toledo businessman Earl Muntz saw a potential for car audio use in
these broadcast tapes and went into business making 4-Track tape
cartridges and players for car use in 1962, later adding home units
as well.

William Lear, who helped develop the first Motorola radio was
riding high on success. He invented the Lear Jet in 1963, a private
luxury aircraft for wealthy business people and owning a Lear jet was
the ultimate status symbol. Lear was in a car with Muntz and
listening to the car's 4-Track system when he had an idea. While the
4-Track tape was suitable for single albums, many classical albums
were double albums. But by narrowing the tracks to 8 tracks with four
stereo programs, he could put a double album on one tape cartridge
and efficiently save recording tape (which was still selling for
premium prices in those days.) for single albums.

Lear began developing the system in the late 1963 and unveiled the
Stereo
8, as the format was originally called in 1964. The biggest
difference in the design of the 8-Track tape from the 4-Track was the
pinch roller was part of the cartridge itself in the 8-Track. This
helped to protect the tape.

And not only that, Lear had very high connections
with the Ford Motor Company and RCA Records, who had enough faith in
Lear to manufacture auto players and pre-recorded tapes for this new
system. Needless to say, Lear's 8-Track quickly began to dominate
over Muntz's 4-Track in the consumer marketplace.

But Muntz ultimately had the last laugh. I recently
discovered Muntz analog technology went away a lot later than I had
previously known. Radio stations of course still depended on it
through the '70s, '80s and in the 1990s, when digital began to take
over radio station control rooms, it morphed into something new for
the late '90s - the gigantic Muzak Background Music tape of
the 1990s.

But perhaps the most remarkable thing about the first
Muntz 4-Track stereo tape players of 1962 was they were built to
last. And they could even play the 1990s cartridges because it
used the same technology. Just in a massive form that they had
planned for decades in advance.

A super rare 1960s Muntz Home Stereo 4-Track Tape
Player, similar to the one in the above video with original wood
case. Original Muntz Car Stereo 4-Track Tape Players could play the
giant Muzak cartridges of the 1990s too. Images: eBay

The 8-Track reigned car audio for most of the '70s.
But cassette tape was starting to make inroads. By 1980, cassettes
had overtaken 8-Tracks as the most popular car tape format.

Remember these?

Radio was still the most popular medium in cars. But
radio was also changing. FM was replacing AM as the preferred band
for music, leading more auto manufacturers to include AM/FM radio as
standard equipment as opposed to AM alone. The stations themselves
began using more compression and became louder. This had the effect
of masking minor picket-fencing noises and the overall generally
crappy factory car stereo speakers, improving FM's sound in vehicles.
Even low end portable radios sounded better.

KUBE
93.3 FM Seattle was a prime example of manic
compression. It
really did sound like this. In the 1980's to early '90s, KUBE was the
LOUDEST station on the Seattle FM radio dial - bar
none. And they were
extremely successful. They literally jumped off the dial when you
tuned past them and there was no questioning what you were listening
to. The station had jingles
galore to drill
that
in your head.

AM radio stations however was starting to struggle. Music formats
became older-skewing or stations flipped to talk radio. With
exception of the rare Top 40, alternative rock or hard rock station,
nearly all AM pop stations became oldies. Country music had largely
moved to FM and the question was (and still is), will AM radio
survive?

Enter AM
Stereo. It was designed to give AM a competitive advantage to FM
and AM Stereo really did sound good. But there was no standard
amongst broadcasters or radio manufacturers on which transmission
system to use. This caused listener/station and manufacturer
confusion and ultimately the idea never took off.

Besides, the public's attention had turned towards
the CD. The Compact Disc was invented in 1979 by a joint project of
Sony and Phillips researchers and first sold in Japan in 1982.

It was designed as a rich audiophile toy because
nearly all of the very first CD titles were classical. The CDs
themselves costed $30 each in 1984 (that's $70 in 2016 dollars.) Pop
music also began appearing on CDs that year and so were the first
in-dash CD player prototypes.

But it would take until 1987 before the CD was on
nearly the footing as cassettes and the then fading vinyl LP. Sony
had invented the battery powered Discman in 1985 for playing CDs.

And soon, adapters to play the Discman and other
battery operated portable CD players through existing car cassette
players were made.

But car CD players didn't become standard until the
early 1990s. And soon, they would be upended by the MP3. But there
were usually no adapter inputs for MP3 players. This led to the
creation of tiny FM transmitters that relayed the audio from the
headphone jack of an iPod or any other headphone jack equipped medium
to the car's FM radio.

And radio was undergoing enormous changes as well. AM
radio continued it's decline. But it was the effects of The
Telecommunications Act of 1996 that changed the landscape of radio.
Soon, hundreds of once independently operated radio stations or those owned by smaller
chains were gobbled up by mega-conglomerates such as Clear Channel
(now iHeartMedia), CBS, Cumulus and Entercom. Programs, air
personalities, formats and even entire stations that were once local
institutions were suddenly scrapped as stations bought their rivals
and changed the formats and radio listeners began to not like some of
these new changes. There were demands to create a low power FM (LPFM)
service. And the rise of satellite radio led the terrestrial radio
conglomerates to respond with HD Radio.

HD Radio (Hybrid Digital, not High Definition) worked
by piggybacking a digital signal on the main analog radio signal.
Each digital signal could hold up to 4 channels of different
programming. The HD-1 channel is always used as a digital simulcast
of the main analog signal and HD-2, HD-3 and HD-4 channels were used
for alternate programming or leased out to radio networks or
community/ethnic groups. But the HD Radio sub-channel programming was
lackluster at best and few station clusters could keep up with the
demands of not just their main signals, but all their HD
sub-channels. And listeners reaction to HD Radio was tepid at best.
Because that was all that was on HD Radio, just the usual stations
and these strange jukeboxes and talk programs on the HD
sub-channels.

But soon, HD Radio became standard in newer cars and
after-market car stereos. Ten years after it's launch, most radio
listeners who purchase newer cars are slowly becoming familiar with
HD Radio, if still mystified by the alternate programming and system
features. The FCC also ruled that radio stations may feed analog FM
translator stations an HD-2/3/4 sub-channel signal, creating little
analog FM radio stations covering a vastly smaller area than the main
signals (the maximum legal power of an FM radio translator is 250
watts. Tower height and nearby co-channel or adjacent channel
frequencies are also a factor in determining actual power.) Using
this loophole, that has ultimately become the main purpose of HD
Radio from the standpoint of the radio industry; To feed analog
radio.

Another major development came in 2005, when the FCC
allowed AM radio stations to also operate FM translators, giving AM
stations that could previously broadcast only during daytime hours
the ability to broadcast 24 hours on FM as well as revitalizing local
AM radio stations lucky enough to be in areas with enough available
local FM radio bandwith to have them.

Using FM frequencies to relay their AM programming,
the purpose is to catch the listeners who could not listen to the AM
signals due to the particular signal anomalies of the AM station. Or
level of the local noise floor of the AM radio band in their areas.
Or most people would simply never be caught dead listening to AM
radio (usually the latter.) This led to many struggling AM stations
with dwindling oldies or talk formats with FM translators to switch
back to contemporary music formats, re-branding under their FM
translator frequencies. WGMP 1170 AM Montgomery, AL "104.9
The Gump" is an example of such a station.

Satellite radio was invented in the 1970s when radio
stations began using satellite delivered programming. In the 1980s,
many terrestrial radio stations rented a transponder on a satellite
to relay their programming to distant areas (CFMI Vancouver, BC used
the Anik-D satellite to relay it's programming.) And in 1990, there
were people envisioning a system that would be like cable, but for
your car where you could get hundreds of the best radio stations in
America for a low monthly price. Satellite CD Radio, Inc. petitioned
the FCC to assign new satellite frequencies to broadcast digital
audio to cars and homes

But the National Association of Broadcasters (NAB)
set their face against it. The NAB felt this would jeopardize local
radio, but Satellite CD Radio, Inc. pushed on, They became CD Radio, Inc
and spent the next five years lobbying the FCC to allow for a
satellite radio service and another building capital for the launch
of three satellites and became Sirius. The FCC also sold a license for satellite radio
to American Mobile Radio Corporation. This company would become XM
Satellite Radio.

Satellite radio would get it's biggest promotion yet
from something completely unrelated to them. At the 2004 Super Bowl
game, Janet Jackson experienced a "wardrobe malfunction"
during a duet with Justin Timberlake, which exposed her right nipple
for less than a split second. No one actually saw her nipple, but the
pixelated video close-up of her right breast was replayed in slow
motion on news programs over the course of several weeks. Which
resulted in a massive (and obviously manufactured) uproar over
obscenity in broadcast media.

Until Jackson's debacle, people had gotten used to
nationally syndicated "shock talk" personalities such as
Howard Stern and Tom Leykis on the radio. Suddenly even the vaguest
references to genitalia were suddenly off limits. This did not only
affect the shock talk shows, but the public service programs that
discussed serious topics as important as prostate and even breast
cancer.

Classic Rock radio stations which had previously
broadcast uncensored versions of "Jet Airliner" Steve
Miller Band, "Who Are You" The Who and "Play Guitar"
John Mellencamp for decades with no complaints whatsoever during
daytime hours were suddenly forced to play the clean edits of these
songs. Or stop playing them. Period. Within hours of the "Nipplegate"
incident, the FCC sent out strict, yet extremely vague obscenity warnings to
terrestrial radio/TV broadcasters with draconian fines and
repercussions for even the slightest violation, requiring hours of
legal consultations from station owners, managers, programmers and
personalities.

Even the lawyers weren't sure. Beyond child
pornography, there is no absolutely clear set definition of
obscenity. Just an extremely vague "three-prong" litmus
test. But your art may be someone else's smut. So the Supreme Court
in their ruling of FCC
v. Pacifica Foundation left it at seven deadly words you're not
supposed to say on the radio and the FCC to
determine if and when you can say them (they haven't exactly done
a terrific job.)

The Seven Deadly Words You Can't Say On The Radio

And there's still no truly uniform way to determine
what is indecent or profane either. Society changes with the times
and the broadcast standards of 1978 do not apply in an age when you
can hear the seven deadly words on any school playground.

Sirius and XM merged on February 27, 2007. The FCC
concluded it was not a monopoly as mobile streaming radio was being
developed, ushering in services such as Pandora and Spotify as well
as an almost infinite assortment of terrestrial, foreign and
streaming-only broadcasters. The podcast is allowing listeners to
control their own listening schedules.

And going into the
future, it looks very likely streaming and on-demand radio will
eventually replace AM/FM, satellite radio and all physical formats.
As cars themselves become more dependent on web based artificial
control and access, this is the only next logical step in the
evolution of car audio. Terrestrial radio is just one of a bazillion
different other entertainment apps of daily life. And
mobile technology is quietly developing as we speak.

While 5G isn't much
more than a tech marketing buzzword now (the ITU has plans to have
the 5G standards ready by 2020, in spite of the current tech market
speculation.) And things will change further.